Abstract
Situated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Azores plateau is a region of elevated topography encompassing the triple junction between the Eurasian, Nubian and North American plates. The plateau is crossed by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the Terceira Rift is generally thought of as its northern boundary. The origin of the plateau and of the Terceira Rift is still under debate. This region is associated with active volcanism. Geophysical data describe complex tectonic and seismic patterns. The mantle under this region is characterized by anomalously slow seismic velocities. However, this mantle structure has not yet been used to quantitatively assess the influence of the mantle dynamics on the surface tectonics. In this study, we use a highly resolved tomography model to model the convection occurring in the mantle beneath the Azores region. The convection pattern points out two distinct upwelling, thus proving that the volcanism emplacement is created by a buoyant mantle upwelling. The modeled dynamic topography recovers well the characteristics of the depth anomaly associated with the Azores plateau, except for the south-eastern most part, thus proving that most of the depth anomaly associated with the Azores plateau is created by the present-day mantle dynamics. The stresses induced by the mantle convection can account for the lifting regime observed over the Azores plateau and the Terceira Rift, and its consequences in terms of surface morphology and seismicity.

Abstract
The development of applications for high-performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based embedded systems is a long and error-prone process. Typically, developers need to be deeply involved in all the stages of the translation and optimization of an application described in a high-level programming language to a lower-level design description to ensure the solution meets the required functionality and performance. This paper describes the use of a novel aspect-oriented hardware/software design approach for FPGA-based embedded platforms. The design-flow uses LARA, a domain-specific aspect-oriented programming language designed to capture high-level specifications of compilation and mapping strategies, including sequences of data/computation transformations and optimizations. With LARA, developers are able to guide a design-flow to partition and map an application between hardware and software components. We illustrate the use of LARA on two complex real-life applications using high-level compilation and synthesis strategies for achieving complete hardware/software implementations with speedups of 2.5x and 6.8x over software-only implementations. By allowing developers to maintain a single application source code, this approach promotes developer productivity as well as code and performance portability.

Abstract
Cellular Genetic Algorithms (cGAs) exhibit a natural parallelism that makes them interesting candidates for hardware implementation, as several processing elements can operate simultaneously on subpopulations shared among them. This paper presents a scalable architecture for a cGA, suitable for FPGA implementation. A regular array of custom designed processing elements (PEs) works on a population of solutions that is spread into dual-port memory blocks locally shared by adjacent PEs. A travelling salesman problem with 150 cities was used to verify the implementation of the proposed cGA on a Virtex-6 FPGA, using a population of 128 solutions with different levels of parallelism (1, 4, 16 and 64 PEs). Results have shown that an increase of the number of PEs does not degrade the quality of the convergence of the iterative process, and that the throughput increases almost linearly with the number of PEs. Comparing with a software implementation running in a PC, the cGA with 64 PEs has shown a 45x speedup.

Abstract
This paper briefly presents the main points on the development and testing of an extremum seeking controller used to maximize the longitudinal velocity of surface sailing vehicles by changing the angle of the sail. The algorithm is suitable for sailing purposes since it requires only the measurements of the vehicle's velocity and the sail angle. As an illustration, we present a few simulation results on our previously-obtained sailing yacht simulator, which was developed based on a 4 DOF nonlinear dynamic model for surface sailing vehicles, showing that the proposed extremum seeking controller is capable of maximizing the sailing yacht's speed performance through online sail tuning. Furthermore, the proposed sail optimization algorithm is tested at sea on an experimental platform, i.e. a small scale autonomous sailboat, illustrating the potential of the controller.

Abstract
This paper tackles the problem of localization of an acoustic pinger by a team of cooperative marine robots. A pinger, whose location is unknown, intermittently emits an acoustic ping which is sensed by hydrophones mounted on marine robots. In addition to position, the instant of emission is unknown. A team of robots carrying a total of four hydrophones is therefore (theoretically) required to estimate the position without ambiguity. The precision of the estimate and the uncertainty critically depend on the position of the hydrophones. In order to obtain the best possible estimation, we explore the possibility of using a cooperative method that leads the robots to points where the overall observability is improved.

Abstract
In this paper we investigate the creation of an heterogeneous underwater network with static and mobile assets cooperating together in coordinated missions using acoustic links. Each underwater device combines communication, networking, and sensing capabilities, and cooperates with the other devices to accomplish a given task. The flexibility and capability of the proposed system allows to overcome the limitations of commercial solutions currently available in the market which typically focus on point to point communications. SUNSET framework has been used to provide acoustic communication and networking capabilities to AUVs, ASVs and moored systems developed by the Oceans Systems Group, at the University of Porto, in Portugal. New solutions have been developed and tested allowing to combine together acoustic data transmission and ranging estimation, to control the underwater nodes acoustically and to instruct the vehicles on keeping a given formation using acoustic links. To validate the proposed approach several experiments with increasing complexity have been conducted at the laboratory and in the field. The experimental results confirm the validity, efficiency and reliability of the proposed solution opening to several possibilities for future developments.